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Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

maggieappleton.com

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Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#101

Post by saidarembrace »

anonymous908213 wrote: post #55
azan_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Wh…

Not everything has to be monetized, buddy. It's okay to relax.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#102

Post by d1sxeyes »

radlad wrote: post #48
pdntspa wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry about people who use this approach where they never look at the code. Vibe-coding IS possible but you have to spent a lot of time in plan mode and be very clear about architecture and the abstractions you want it to use. I've written two seperate moderately-sized codebases using agentic techniques (oftentimes being very lazy and just blanket approving changes), and I don't encounter logic or off-by-one errors…

In a recent Yegge interview, he mentions that he often throws away the entire codebase and starts from scratch rather than try to get LLMs to refactor their code for architecture.

Honestly, in my experience so far, if an LLM starts going down a bad path, it’s better just to roll back to a point where things were OK and throw away whatever it was doing, rather than trying to course correct.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#103

Post by Xmd5a »

piker wrote: post #52
mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

> If you read Steve's writeup Personally I got about 3 paragraphs into what seemed like a twelve-page fevered dream and filed it under "not for me yet".

> OK! That was like half a dozen great reasons not to use Gas Town. If I haven’t got rid of you yet, then I guess you’re one of the crazy ones. Hang on. This will be a long and complex ride. I’ve tried to go super top-down and simplify as much as I can, but it’s a bit of a textbook.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#104

Post by walthamstow »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #99
mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

Yeah where he probably Burns like a million dollars of money. Just for fun!

He's paying $600 a month for 3x Claude Max subs. It's in his article.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#105

Post by anonymous908213 »

throwway120385 wrote: post #84
anonymous908213 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Wh…

It sounds like a medical device, in which case marketing it may require FDA approval or notification. Whereas vibe-coding a one-off tool for yourself might still require validation but you're the one taking the risk and accepting liability for it. I think the thing you're missing is that the tool doesn't need to be marketed because someone else could ask their LLM to make them a similar tool but fitting their use cas…

If they're using a 100% vibe-coded tool that they've never read the code of to replace something that would require government approval, for use on real-world patients, they're probably committing medical malpractice as we speak. Let us pray that is not the case.

It doesn't matter if the tool "needs" to be marketed. There is a market of paying customers. If other people are paying $200/month, both your and their lives would be improved significantly by you offering a $100/month replacement software. For all the talk about LLMs replacing the need for packaged software, people are still paying for packaged software, and while they are, you could be making large amounts of money while saving them money. If you're altruistic, you could even release it as FOSS and save a lot of people $200/mo. Unless, of course, your vibe-coded app isn't actually remotely capable of replacing the software in question.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#106

Post by SomaticPirate »

mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

It isn't though. It crossed the chasm when Steve (who I would like to think is somewhat comfortable after writing a book, holding a director level position at several startups) decided to endorse an outright crypto pump and dump.

When he decided to monetize the eyeballs on the project instead of anything related to the engineering. Which, of course, Steve isn't smart enough to understand (in his own words) and he recommends you not buy but he still makes a tidy profit from it.

Its a memecoin now... that has a software project attached to it. Anything related to engineering died the day he failed to disavow the crypto BS and instead starting shrilling it.

What happened to engineers not calling out BS as BS.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#107

Post by Ronsenshi »

pydry wrote: post #77
mediaman wrote: post #46

I don't get the widespread hatred of Gas Town. If you read Steve's writeup, it's clear that this is a big fun experiment. It pushes and crosses boundaries, it is a mixture of technology and art, it is provocative. It takes stochastic neural nets and mashes them together in bizarre ways to see if anything coherent comes out the other end. And the reaction is a bunch of Very Serious Engineers who cross their arms and h…

>I often feel like our industry has lost its sense of whimsy and experimentation from the early days, when people tried weird things to see what would work and what wouldn't. Remember the days when people experimented with and talked about things that werent LLMs? I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.…

> I used to go to a lot of industry events and I really enjoyed hearing about the diversity of different things people worked on both as a hobby and at work.

I go to tech meetups regularly. The speed at which any conversation end up on the topic of AI is extremely grating to me. No more discussions about interesting problems and creative solutions that people come up with. It's all just AI, agentic, vibe code.

At what point are we going to see the loss of practical skills if people keep on relying on LLMs for all their thinking?

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#108

Post by d1sxeyes »

alecbz wrote: post #71
azan_ wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

Wait, so you're a radiologist and you're using software you vibecoded to generate radiology reports for real patients? Is that, like, allowed?

Depends where in the world they are. Here in Hungary, it’s not uncommon to email your-family-doctor@gmail.com

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#109

Post by shermantanktop »

Yegge is just running arbitrage on an information gap.

It's the same chasm that all the AI vendors are exploiting: the gap between people who have some idea what is going on and the vast mass of people who don't but are addicted to excitement or fear of the future.

Yegge is being fake-playful about it but if you have read any of his other writing, this tracks. None of it is to be taken very seriously because he values provocation and mischief a little too highly, but bits of it have some ideas worth thinking about.

Re: Gas Town's agent patterns, design bottlenecks, and vibecoding at scale

#110

Post by SimianSci »

I've been researching the usage of Developer tooling at mine and other organizations for years now and I'm genuinely trying to understand where agentic coding fits into the evolving landscape. One of the most solid things im beginning to understand is that many people dont understand how these tools influence technical debt.

Debt doesnt come due immediately, its accrued and may allow for the purchase of things that were once too expensive, but eventually the bill comes due.

Ive started referring to vibe-coding as "Credit Cards" for developers. Allowing them to accrue massive amounts of technical debt that were previously out of reach. This can provide some competent developers with incredible improvments to their work. But for the people who accrue more Technical Debt than they have the ability to pay off, it can sink their project and cost our organization alot in lost investment of both time and money.

I see Gas Town and tools like as debt schemes where someone applies for more credit cards to pay the payments on prior cards they've maxed out, compounding the issue with the vague goal of "eventually it pays off." So color me skeptical.

Not sure if this analogy holds up to all things, but its been helping my organization navigate the application of agents, since it allows us to allocate spend depending on the seniority of each developer. Thus ive been feeling like an underwriter having to figure out if a developer requesting more credits or budget for agentic code can be trusted to pay off the debt they will accrue.

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